The Pirates and their fans are finally getting a taste of a bright future.

Let’s play a game. I’ll give you a real-life baseball scenario, you tell me where it took place:

A 23-year-old third baseman hits a walkoff three-run home run in front of a raucous sellout home crowd.

Gotta be a place like Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, New York, or St. Louis, right? Where sellouts are commonplace and top prospects perform like they’re supposed to. No, that was a scene from PNC Park in Pittsburgh on Saturday.

Pedro Alvarez, 23, has blasted 10 home runs in his first 163 major league at-bats and played the hero on Saturday evening in front of a massive crowd that was aided by the promise of a George Thorogood post-game concert. Dejan Kovaceivc of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote this morning that it was “one of the great finishes in PNC Park history,” and there’s no doubting that.

The Pirates have struggled through some really rough seasons in the past decade and they’re going to finish 2010 with a losing record for the 18th straight year. But Alvarez and players like Andrew McCutchen have allowed the fans in Pittsburgh to imagine a light at the end of the tunnel.

Alvarez is a Stargell kind of guy and will be a boomer as long as he stays healthy. Don’t let the silly uninformed writings of the daily baseball player notes writers from places like rotoworld and rotowire fool you. These guys don’t follow the team and don’t have a clue what’s going on in Pittsburgh.